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Monday, October 29, 2007

Book Review: Winter's Child by Margaret Maron

I have a bad compulsion. The compulsion to finish a book, no matter if I'm getting any enjoyment out of it or not. Well, the one exception is the one book about adoptive parents. That one just pissed me off.

But this book, and unfortunately for me, quite a few before it, have just come up empty even though I continue to flip through the pages -- reading each and every word.

Why do I do this? I don't know. It could be the part of my brain that has me counting all the time.

So I'm sure by now it's understood that I did not enjoy this book. I didn't like it from the first few chapters, yet I continued. I couldn't wait to finish it so that I could do the "check!", it's complete! compulsion that I have.

This novel starts with something that happens near Raleigh, NC. A man gets killed while driving his truck in Colleton County. I haven't tried to figure out where Colleton County is, but I now recall that I was giving this book more leeway because of its North Carolina setting.

The investigation into this man's death becomes the crux of the novel. Or so I thought. Next thing I know, I'm reading a first person account -- the narrator of the novel -- and it's not the person who was investigating this murder. Instead, it's his wife.

So the narrator is not introduced until the second or third chapter. This confused me until I figured this 'style' later in the book.

The story turns into another crime, in another state, with a whole different set of people. And these two characters, the one who was investigating the NC crime *and* his wife, suddenly become investigators in *this* crime...the one outside of their jurisdiction.

That's the gist of the novel. There are no surprises here. It wasn't even the fact that it was so easy to figure out what happened to who, but that I didn't even care. There was just words to fill empty space that didn't do anything to throw me off, or even intrigue me, to the end.

Yet I finished it.

Please. Please! Let me read a book that does the Calgon thing and just, well, takes me away...